Quote:
Originally Posted by pedz
Most manuals come as PDFs. PDFs are not first class citizens in Apple's "Books". On the Mac, when you open the PDF, it opens in Preview. You can not save a bookmark. On iOS, there are features like adding notes and high lights that you can do with other formats (I guess epub?) but not with PDFs. Last... if I read part of a PDF on the Mac, the page is not synced up with iOS.
From this point, there are so many different choices that it becomes bewildering but lets try to keep using "Books". As a specific example of this quest is this PDF for Canon RF 28-70mm F2 L USM On page 6 (called ENG-5) is an image of the lens with notations.
I've tried three or four different PDF to epub converters including Calibre and in each case, that image is lost. Plus, the general format looks a bit weird but I can handle that. The sample above is just an example I picked.
When converting from PDF to epub, are images consistently lost or is this example unusual? I will try other conversions but thought I would ask ... perhaps there is a common trick or something that I am missing.
Do other readers like Nook on Mac / iOS or Kindle on Mac / iOS handle PDFs better? The key feature is I just want the last page I read kept across all the platforms. Adding bookmarks that sync would be very nice too.
Thank you for your time
pedz |
PDFs are not good on any platform, ever... PDFs were designed in the print and fax era of the 1980s for businesses to have a way to pass along printed/faxed documents without having to take them to a copy machine. PDFs were never really designed for what they have become, and as such they are an ancient technology that has been half-a$$ed updated over the decades to make them sort of work for today's needs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nimapourkarimi
In all the PDF readers that I tested, the only one that has a Mac version is PDF Expert, It flawlessly syncs between Mac and iOS via iCloud. But, PDF Expert is expensive IMO, $9,99 on iOS and $79.99 on mac.
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There are plenty of PDF readers available on iOS. Just type in PDF on the Apps app. Even the Kindle app will display them. Some apps are good and others suck. As stated above, PDFs suck by their nature of design and will never be great in today's tablet environment.
I really don't like PDF manuals at all, and most companies that use them for their manuals don't understand enough about publishing eBooks or even HTML pages to publish their manuals in those formats. In the early days before the internet, PDFs were easy to publish via Adobe Acrobat. Just feed in your word processor file(s) for your print manual and have Adobe Acrobat turn it into a PDF. That was an easy format for companies to convert to. After the internet and HTML came along, converting printed manuals to web pages and later to eBooks required a different type of formatting and a lot of extra thought and effort, and it simply wasn't cost effective to have two different sets of each manual's source files to create and maintain in your publications department--one for print and one for electronic transfer. The cheap and easy way was to use PDFs. I spent 25+ years as a technical writer in several software companies, and I can say from experience that having to maintain the source files for print manuals, help text, and other electronic transfer files was a royal PITA. You had to be careful to update all the different sources the same else one source my not jive with another. It required more work, more software tools, more skills, etc., and so it was a costly venture. And keep in mind that most software companies viewed their publications departments as a necessity required by customers, but they were unwilling to pump much of a budget into them, so they demanded the least expenditures within publications that they could get away with.